Kate’s Mystery Books home up for sale

David L. Harris

Sunday

Aug 26, 2007 at 12:01 AMAug 26, 2007 at 6:04 AM

The mystery now is where will she go? Since 1983, Kate’s Mystery Books at 2211 Mass. Ave. has been a clearinghouse for books in that genre and now owner Kate Mattes is selling her venerable red-and-black Victorian that houses the shop. She put a “for sale” sign on the property last Friday.

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The mystery now is where will she go?

Since 1983, Kate’s Mystery Books at 2211 Mass. Ave. has been a clearinghouse for books in that genre and now owner Kate Mattes is selling her venerable red-and-black Victorian that houses the shop. She put a for sale sign on the property last Friday.

Cantabrigia blog: What do you think?

But Mattes wants to be clear about one thing: she’s not going out of business.

“I’m not planning to close at all,” she said, although she’s not sure whether she'll keep the store, which houses between 15,000 and 20,000 new and used mystery books, in town. “The thing is I have books I don’t have room to put all out. I’d like to put them out so it’s not as hysterically wearing as I get older.”

Whenever she sells the house, Mattes said she’d like to stay in Cambridge, but she couldn’t say for sure.

“I’d like to stay in the area,” she said. “It depends on what is available in Cambridge when it sells.”

She’ll also be taking the thousands of black cat creations — salt and peppershakers and other paraphernalia that bear the unlucky feline — from around her store with her wherever she goes.

Mattes, who lives on the second and third floors above the store, opened the store on a perfect day for a mystery book shop to open: Friday, May 13, 1983.

“It’s been good for me,” she said.

Mattes grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, and graduated from Beloit College in Wisconsin with degrees in ethics and theology/sociology. "I wanted to be a social worker when I got out," she said. That was just a temporary plan, though. From the time she was in high school, Mattes always knew what she would do once she had made her contribution to the social work field and saved some money.

"I said what I always wanted to do was to have a mystery bookstore," Mattes said.

She earned a master of science degree in social work from Washington University in St. Louis. After graduating from college, she taught at the Washington University medical school as a clinical instructor for training child psychiatrists and social workers. After weighing her options of where to move after graduate school, Mattes selected the Boston area over San Francisco because she had several friends here already. In 1969, she first moved to Cambridge, accepting a job with Project Together, a joint program of the Cambridge courts and human services that provided after-school counseling for public school students and their families.

She liked the city's then-small town feel and its big-city opportunities, she said.

Mattes did not want to put off her dream of opening a mystery bookstore until she was old; her parents missed out on their goals of traveling the world after retirement because both died within one year of each other shortly after they finished their careers, she said. When she finally decided she was ready to open the store, after working here as a social worker, Mattes drew on what she had learned spending a work-study semester away from college under the tutelage of a New York City publisher. She invested her inheritance from the family estate in buying the building where the store is housed. Mattes also spent a field term with Otto Penzler at the Mysterious Bookshop in New York City.

Kate's Mystery Books hosts regular author readings, sometimes about one a week, more typically the third Wednesday of the month, in the evening at the store. Her criteria for selecting books to sell in the store is simple: if Mattes knows of a regular customer whom she feels would like a particular title, she orders it.

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